Andy Warhol painted camouflage in 1986, a year before he died, and turned a military pattern into one of the last big ideas of his career. Forty years on, Piaget has put that pattern into gold and stone. The new Andy Warhol 'Camouflage' watch is a limited edition of 86 pieces, a number that points straight back to the year of the paintings.
The Piaget Andy Warhol Watch, Reworked in Camouflage
This is the second piece Piaget has made in partnership with The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, following the Collage limited edition. The trick is in the dial. Rather than printing the pattern, Piaget built it as marquetry, cutting sodalite and turquoise and fitting them together with satin finished yellow gold and polished pink gold. Each color of the camouflage is a different material, so the blobs of blue, turquoise and gold sit at slightly different depths and catch light differently. Piaget calls the result architectural, and in the product shots it reads more like a small relief than a flat dial.
The case keeps the cushion shape the Andy Warhol watch is known for. It measures 45 by 43 mm in rhodium finished 18K white gold, sits 8.08 mm thick and is water resistant to 3 bar. It comes on a blue alligator strap with a pin buckle. The reference is G0A51242.
What Runs Inside
Inside is the Manufacture 501P1, a self winding movement just 3.63 mm thick. It beats at 28,800 vibrations per hour, has 23 jewels and holds a 40 hour power reserve. Piaget finishes it with Côtes de Genève, perlage on the plate, bevelled bridges and blue screws, plus a slate grey tungsten oscillating weight. If the difference between an automatic and a quartz watch is still fuzzy, our guide to watch movements explained covers it.
Why Warhol and Piaget Fit
This is not a licensing deal pulled out of thin air. According to Piaget's Andy Warhol collection history, Warhol owned seven Piaget watches, and four of them now sit in the Maison's private collection. He bought a gold Black Tie model in 1973 and met Yves Piaget in New York in 1979. That cushion shaped Black Tie, a design that dates to 1972, is the watch that later took Warhol's name. The friendship became a formal partnership with the foundation in 2024, and the watches have leaned on Piaget's ornamental stone dials ever since.
The camouflage series suits that history better than most of Warhol's work would. The paintings took something designed to hide and made it loud with color, which is close to what Piaget does with stone. Here the dial is the whole point, and the movement is there to keep it thin.
Who It's For
Eighty six pieces is a small run. It is a collector's watch first, aimed at people who care about stonework and art history as much as the movement. For a very different take on a designer's watch, see the LeBond Norman Foster watch, or read more about the house through Piaget's own history.
